Donate

Donations are not open yet. I would rather set this up properly than quickly, and in the meantime this page sets out how the money will be handled, so that there is nothing left to explain when it does open.

Where the money goes

The money goes to building and maintaining these apps and the ones that come after them. None of the apps have a paid tier, an upsell or advertising, and they never will, so donations are the only way any of this gets funded. I care about the maintaining as much as the building, since what the world is short of is not more launched software but software that somebody is still looking after in five years, and that ongoing care is the part that is hardest to find money for.

Part of the money will pay me, since this is my work. US$80,000 a year is enough for me to start doing this full time, and I am promising now that what I pay myself will never be more than US$200,000 a year in 2026 dollars, adjusted for inflation each year after that using the US Consumer Price Index. That figure is a cap and not a target, and what I am paid will appear in the public ledger described below, alongside every other expense, so that anyone can check I have kept to it.

Beyond that, I want to try radical transparency with the money: what this costs, what I am paid, and every transaction I am able to publish. I don't know yet how far that can go, so I will be experimenting with it as the project grows. The ledger below is where it starts, and after that comes the cost rubric mentioned on the home page, which will show what each app cost to build, what it costs to run each month, and where the money came from.

One of the things I hope this does is demystify what cloud computing actually costs. Most people have no real idea what it takes to keep an app or a website running, whether that is servers, storage, bandwidth, domain names or anything else. I would like these apps to be a worked example that anyone can look through, with real numbers attached, so that the next person building something for the public good has a better idea of what they are getting into.

The ledger

Every contribution and every expense will be recorded in a public ledger that anyone can read without an account. It will be kept by a fiscal host, which is a registered nonprofit that receives and pays out money on a project's behalf, so the records come from the organisation actually handling the money rather than from me, and I cannot quietly leave anything out of them. Depending on the host, and on where the donor lives, a fiscal host can also make donations tax-deductible.

For money coming in, the ledger will show each contribution, when it arrived and how much it was. I intend to choose a host that lets people give without their name appearing, since giving should not require being listed. For money going out, it will show each expense, what it was for, who it was paid to and how much, which covers hosting, domain names, software and A.I. tools, and what I pay myself. Where one expense serves more than one app, I will say how it was split between them, so that the cost of each app can be worked out from the ledger alone, and the cost rubric will be built from those same figures.

Getting a fiscal host involves an application and some waiting, which is why donations are not open yet. I could put a payment button up this week, but I would rather wait until the ledger can be public from the very first contribution. The link to it will go on this page as soon as it exists.